Big problem laying off to tape. Crashing out of FC when starting an edit to tape.

Having a big problem.
1 hr. show, Standard Def
Going out to digibeta

FC 6.04
8 core mac
10 meg ram

Lots of drive space

Already trashed preferences

Will not edit to tape.
If I just make a new sequence with just bars and tone it will edit to tape.

But when I try the main sequence it I get spinning ball of death and then crash out.

Magic Bullet frames on entire sequence but it's all rendered already and will play normally.

Any ideas?

How big is your project file? Export a SCQT movie, start a new project and go to tape with that.



www.strypesinpost.com

What's your sequence settings?



www.strypesinpost.com

D1, 720x486

8 bit uncompressed

Thought of sending it out to a quicktime.
2 hours to make it.
Already missed the deadline

>2 hours to make it.

Then export a reference movie. Much faster.

2 hours? That's unearthly. How full are the drives, what kind of drives are they? Do you have disabled clips in the timeline?



www.strypesinpost.com

Drive is Rocstore FW 800. 1 tb, 650 available. Not that full.

This was supplied to us from the client.

It has been working fine.

I did export-quicktime-video only , unchecked 'make movie self contained.
Still says 2 hours to export

Could be a corrupt render file. What exactly are you doing with Frames? What frame rate is your timeline set to? The worst scenario is that you may have to ditch the render files and re-render.

Try putting 1 clip on a new timeline, drop the same filter, render and see if that goes to tape.

Also, what happens if you mark in/out at a much later point in the video and try to export a reference movie?



www.strypesinpost.com

Tried making exporting a quicktime, just 3 minutes worth.

Started a new project and tried insert editing to a blacked tape.
Worked fine.

If I make a quicktime of the entire show will it need to be broken up into
parts or can the whole thing be exported at once?

Can't re-render the the whole show. It took something like 35 hrs to render over the weekend as it is.

Frames is taking the standard video 29.97 and doing a deinterlace to what amounts to 30p.

As I said it plays fine but won't edit to tape.

>If I make a quicktime of the entire show will it need to be broken up into
>parts or can the whole thing be exported at once?

Definitely it can.

>Tried making exporting a quicktime, just 3 minutes worth.

Does it work? What is the timing of the export?

>Frames is taking the standard video 29.97 and doing a deinterlace to what amounts to 30p.

You're working in a 29.97 timeline?

>Can't re-render the the whole show.

That's the worse case scenario.

>Started a new project and tried insert editing to a blacked tape.
>Worked fine.

Can you edit to tape with a short clip with Frames applied (and rendered) off you current project?



www.strypesinpost.com

Trying again with quicktime export with "make self contained" unchecked.

Strangely now it is say 30 min.

That is very weird. It took like 2-5 mins to get a fully rendered hour long show out as a ref movie (probably to write the audio file to the new QT movie). 30 mins means that FCP may be rendering while you are exporting. Try to get that out as a ref movie and go to tape with that.

Is everything fully rendered (either blue or grey on the render bar).



www.strypesinpost.com

OK,
Although the reference movie was saying 30 minutes at first, it finished in just a few minute.

I started a new sequence, loaded the quicktime ref which is picture only and cut the 4 channels
of mixed audio from the sound mixer.

It now seems to be working.

Ooopps. It just stopped as I was writing this.

However, it let me pick up an insert edit where it stopped.
So I am crossing my fingers that I can get this out even if I have to stop several times.

Okay, back up. How much is "lots of" drive space?


www.derekmok.com

>Ooopps. It just stopped as I was writing this.

What do you mean "stopped"? The machine walked out for a cigarette break? It must give an error message. What does it say?



www.strypesinpost.com

>How much is "lots of" drive space?

650 of 1TB. I'd assume he meant "gigs". If he meant "megabytes". He'll never go to tape.



www.strypesinpost.com

Hey Derek,
as I mentioned it is a Rocstore FW 800. 1 tb, 650 gig available.

It stopped with a skipped frames warning. Seems to be having through put issues from the
drive occasionally. We have been editing with it fine, but play out is a different matter.

The drive was supplied by the client with raw footage already digitized.
I believe the "drive" houses only 1 disk instead of a two way raid since the housing has a low profile. Not what I really want to edit with. I use FW 800 drives all the time for SD with
no problem but they are always 2 way raid 0. We use the OWC Mercury Elite Pro drives and a couple G-Raids.

I think the problems with the play out stopping are separate from the bigger problem of FC crashing out when invoking edit to tape.

I believe as Strypes was guessing, there is a corrupt render file causing the big crash.

It has now been running for 21 minutes without stopping.

Sorry, meant 650 gig in the original post, should have added the "gig"

>It stopped with a skipped frames warning

Try running this later and check if you have any dips in the graph.

[www.aja.com]



www.strypesinpost.com

OK,
Been running 30 minutes now.

I did want to mention the Frames plug in as I had some specific problems with it.

There are two motion interpolation settings in MB Frames, "motion" and "blend".

The default when you apply the filter is "motion". This looked really great. Did the trick
nicely and when it's used in a 29.97 sequence you don't get the much judder. Looks
nice and filmy. However, it plays hell with thin horizontal lines. It really exaggerates the
"rolling" or aliasing of horizontal lines, badly.

However, setting MB Frames to "blend" helped out the lines tremendously.
But it creates a slight smearing of any motion in the frame.

So I did a little of each. I took the entire sequence and duplicated it on the layer above.
The bottom layer was set to "motion" and the top layer to "blend". Then I set the
transparence of the top layer to 50%.

We also added a bit of the "glimmer glass" filter from Tiffen DFX filters to the top layer.
Just a small amount of that to help a little more with the lines since it imparts a slight
diffusion.

All that likely contributed to the 35 hour render for a 58 minute show.

It was not a perfect solution, but it's working for this project

OK, made it out to tape.
Thanks for you input guys, you saved the day!

Cool. Now check the tape and send it out.



www.strypesinpost.com

What I was guessing is that there is some kind of corruption in the render files, or for some reason, FCP is not accessing those files on ETT. ETT requires all media to be rendered, or it will render it before going to tape. But in your case, it was freezing up and crashing when you tried to ETT, could be caused by the plugin, as MB plugins are very processor intensive.

Since you can't ETT, or render because FCP has supposedly rendered everything, exporting a quicktime movie will also force a render on unrendered segments (or send out a general error message and abort when it comes across a corrupt movie file/render file that it can't piece together). But of course, you're working on an hour long project, which will take a while to write the full resolution files to disk, so between the two options, getting out a reference movie is faster. The exploded export time readings at the initial part of the export is due to FCP rendering those segments (i'm guessing the problem lies at the beginning of the sequence).



www.strypesinpost.com